Yoake to Hotaru
by Xairathan
Summary: An AU playing with the idea that Mari's young apperance is caused by her switching to a clone body rather than the Curse of Eva.


Tokyo-3, 2016

No one gets off at any of the eastern rail stations, but the trains keep stopping there anyway. Because they're supposed to, Mari thinks, or something like that: so people like her can still reach the burned-out portions of Tokyo-3 without having to walk an hour in each direction, coming and going from the city's center.

The station Mari gets off at is modeled after the ones from the first Tokyo, only there's just one platform standing between a pair of rails, and none of the sprawling tangle of overhead cables that filled the old city. After the loss of Tokyo-1, the cities that followed were never built that big again. What resulted was Tokyo-3: nestled between the mountains and a lake, just as safe as its past two incarnations- not at all.

With a rickety clattering, the train that carried Mari pulls away, its back lights slowly vanishing between the shadows of the abandoned buildings. Two more stops, then it'll turn around and come back, and there won't be a single soul on it, save for the conductors running the train. No one will come aboard until it's far from this eastern edge, closer to the places that haven't yet been abandoned.

But it'll be back. The same inexorable force that's pulled Mari here will bring it back: Mari would call it habit, or on a bad day, useless sentimentality. Then again, she's here too, so she shouldn't be one to talk.

Mari follows the platform to the exit, a long, winding tunnel that spits her out onto the street. The buildings in front of her, formerly beacons of afternoon light, are dark and pocked with bullet holes. A dark smudge down the street marks where a VTOL went down; its burnt out shell lies embedded in a storefront several meters away, covered by ash and dust.

She used to know what that shop was before it became a wreck, before it was even what the sign says, a cafe. It used to be a bakery. The shop next to it was a flower store, and beside that-

These buildings aren't what they're supposed to be, and neither is Mari. She takes her time picking her way down the street anyway, trying to see the ghosts of tables and shelves in the scorched remains. She tries until she reaches the street corner, where something came down and crushed whatever stood there before: either a convenience store or the entrance to the apartments above. It takes the echo of the returning train ringing over the streets to make Mari admit defeat and turn back to face the hills, the one reason why she's come. Stepping forward, she puts the burned-out block to her back, and her memories of it. Ahead of her lie twenty more, stretching towards the distant mountains, beckoning to her with their silence.

* * *

Bethany Base, 2014

The new EVA has four legs, a lance instead of a second arm, and a paint job that looks like it came straight from the army. "That's Evangelion-05," Mari hears her handler- but a funny word, but then again, she's supposed to be a spy first and a scientist second- say. "This one will most likely be matched to you. Even if it's not a full match, you'll probably be given priority as its backup pilot."

"Because you've had me testing all the interfacing software, right?"

"In part, yes. It's also because you aren't being assigned to Unit-02, since NERV-Berlin found a candidate for it."

"For _her_ ," Mari whispers, turning her head to conceal the movement of her lips. "Who's getting 02?"

"Another child," her handler says. "A prodigy. She hasn't been officially confirmed yet-"

"Another girl?"

"-so I'm not at liberty to disclose her identity."

"Top secret, I get it. Don't have to use all those fancy words on me." Mari leans closer to the glass window separating the box overlooking Unit-05's hangar and the crews below, crawling over the metal structure, fixing the last plates of armor onto the EVA. "How do you know Fives won't reject me? Maybe go for a nice guy…"

"The Evangelion interfacing software is meant to be impartial. It's only a coincidence that the two candidates it's chosen so far are female."

"Female and under fifteen," Mari says. "Really, that's all we have to work with?"

"An operative in Germany is already in contact with the future pilot of Unit-02. We have no other knowledge on the identity of Unit-00's pilot. Ikari has kept that knowledge restricted to the highest levels of NERV."

"Ikari's never been a group player, anyway." Mari tilts her head, catching her reflection in the changing light. Fourteen years later, she still somehow manages to make the twin-tail look that Yui gave to her work. Maybe it's the glasses, or- what Mari believes- another case of 'whatever Yui Ayanami _(_ not Ikari, _not_ Ikari) does comes out infallibly'. "Any idea who's getting paired up with One?"

"There hasn't been a match. Ikari doesn't seem to be concerned. There are matches for three units, after all."

"And I'm one of them. A thirty year old scientist with no practical military training."

For once, her handler doesn't have an immediate reply. They listen to the rhythmic clanging of the work crews driving screws into Unit-05's armor, the closest the EVA will ever have to a heartbeat. "That's why I called you here, Makinami," he says at last.

A chill wafts over Mari's skin. Below, she's sure there's a lull in the noise, a brief silence like a held breath.

"I thought you said I was matched to Fives."

"Yes, but as soon as we announce it, NERV HQ will ask for a candidate profile. We can give you a false name and papers, but your appearance will give you away."

"How am I supposed to fix that?"

"What we are _recommending_ is that you become the… physically expected age of a pilot."

"You want to age me down… fifteen, sixteen years? That's impossible."

"It isn't. There's a way. You'll be surrendering your present body for that of a younger you. You'll have the same personality, all the thoughts that are in your head right now. Nothing else will change. We've already taken the liberty of creating a body-"

"You cloned me?" Mari hisses, turning towards her handler and storming up to him.

"When you signed your contract with us-"

"Don't give me that bullshit! Even if I did agree to this, how would you even know something like this would work?"

"Because the process has been tested before and produced a successful result." The man in front of Mari takes a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs at his forehead, otherwise ignoring Mari standing inches away, her fists clenched. "This entire procedure was introduced to us by Yui Ikari. We perfected it post-mortem."

"Ayanami," Mari mumbles. "Yui Ayanami."

"Aside from letting you blend in, switching to a younger body would help to deflect suspicion should Ikari ever learn your actual name. He wouldn't even recognize you."

"He wouldn't even recognize me right now." Mari scrapes her teeth together, setting her jaw. "You said Yui helped you… create this process?"

"It wasn't the focus of her work, but she did contribute greatly to it."

"You could be lying to me about this. I know how you people work."

"Makinami." The man lifts his head, meeting Mari's eyes at last. At 5'5, she'd be just an inch shorter than Yui, if Yui were here. "I'll put this simply. The only way we'll announce you as a match for Unit-05 is if you agree to this. If you don't, we'll keep you on the program, but you won't be a pilot. Your work with Unit-05 will end here."

"And wouldn't that just be a shame?" Mari shoots back, facing towards the window. An ultimatum with Yui's name attached: things hadn't gotten that desperate yet, that speaking of Yui would be the only way to get through to Mari. Maybe it's the truth after all. "Yui's son. How old would he be, now?"

"Twelve, turning thirteen this year."

Another thing- she'd sworn to protect Yui's son. She'd promised herself to follow Yui's work to its conclusion, to not let it be forgotten, and she'd promised it over the empty ground of Yui's grave.

It'd be more than wasteful to turn back now.

"How long will it take?" asks Mari.

"Not long at all. A few minutes."

"And this body?"

"We'll have to get rid of it. Incineration and a burial at sea. Something to make sure no one will ever learn what happened."

"So there'll be no going back."

"Yes."

"All this, just to pilot EVA?" laughs Mari. All this, for Yui. "Alright. What do I need to do?"

"Just follow me."

They leave the observation deck behind, taking an elevator deeper into Bethany Base past the high-security laboratories, and deeper still. Mari hadn't even known the base reached this deep, and doesn't doubt that the place where they're going isn't marked on the elevator at all.

Their stop is announced, unceremoniously, by the gliding apart of the doors and a single bulb flickering on, illuminating two tubes in the center of a room cluttered with twisted metal. One's already occupied, and the sight of that backlit tube sends a chill down Mari's spine.

"I apologize for the mess. We set this up quite quickly."

"We being?"

"Myself and some higher-level operatives stationed here."

"You're all over the place, aren't you?" Mari asks, stepping over a large bundle of wires. She'd thought she would be unable to look at the replica of herself, but it doesn't look like her. Without Yui's glasses, with her hair unbound and floating freely in the LCL, the body in the tube looks nothing like Mari, or so she'd think.

"Plenty of people agree NERV is up to something we won't like. Some of us are just willing to take an extra step and try to stop it." The man hits a few switches on a nearby console, and the second tube opens with a hiss. "If you'd step in, we can begin the process."

"Clothes and all?"

"Yes. They won't affect anything at all. Though afterwards your belongings, for the most part, will also need to be destroyed. The less evidence of your present self is left for people to find, the better."

"And what will you tell everyone who notices I'm gone?"

"Reassignment to another branch of NERV. Though, let's not kid ourselves, Makinami. You keep so much to yourself that if anyone does notice, it won't be any time soon."

"True, but did you have to put it that way?" Mari smiles- for the last time in this body, such a strange thought- and steps into the tube. "Alright, now what?"

"Relax. I suggest you take deep breaths. You're familiar with oxygenated LCL, right?"

At those words, a trickle of the orange liquid drips down from above, quickly becoming a stream. It splashes over Mari's face, rapidly filling the tube. Finally it hits her that if this fails, she would drown or otherwise be gone forever- just like Yui, she thinks. Maybe this hadn't been for Yui's sake after all, but for some subconscious, never acknowledged desire of hers that she'd carried since Yui died, that maybe now she wouldn't have to keep going, either.

The LCL reaches Mari's mouth and overtakes her nose. She breathes it in, and it sears not only her lungs, but seemingly everywhere else, and everything, even her own mind.

The blood-like iron of LCL is the last thing her body tastes and smells. One meter away, a pair of clear blue eyes shoot open, and that body's first memories are engraved into Mari's mind: the stinging pain that sings through her body, and the sharp taste of the LCL.

* * *

Tokyo-3, 2002

The hill isn't nearly as tall as the ones that bordered Kyoto, but it's just as steep. Here the grass reaches past Mari's shins, tickling the bottom of her knees. "I don't know how you manage to find these places," Mari says, carefully working her way through the path that Yui, several paces ahead, has laid out for her.

"When you live somewhere long enough, you learn all the good, secluded places. Hurry up, Mari. We're almost there."

"Didn't you say we had all night?"

"Yeah, but you're only in Tokyo for… four days? That's hardly any time at all." Yui pauses, turning back to look at Mari. In the four years they've been apart, she hasn't changed a bit- same haircut, same laugh, and she still wears her lab coat everywhere.

"As long as I'm near you, I'll call that time well spent."

"Always such a flatterer, Mari," laughs Yui. Mari watches the corners of her eyes crease, notes the slight twitch of Yui's hand, like she'd been about to move it to her mouth. "Did you get any girls in London that way?"

"Afraid not. I haven't really been trying."

Mari wonders if it's her imagination, or if Yui's next step really did come a little short, if she'd seen Yui's perpetual smile falter for a moment. Yui shakes her head, hair briefly obscuring her mouth, and that smile's back like it'd never been missed at all. "Maybe someday," Yui says quietly- she'd always been the optimistic type. "Anyways, we're here!"

They walk up past a gnarled, shriveled tree, ducking under the branches that hang low over the path. Yui moves off to the side, waiting, so it'll be Mari who's the first one to step into the clearing beyond: an inexplicable circle of ground untouched by the grass. Just a few feet further, the hillside drops away, and the lights of Tokyo-3 shine through into the clearing, painting it gold.

"It isn't the same as Kyoto, unfortunately." Yui brushes a few rocks away with her foot and lowers herself onto the ground, pulling her legs beneath her and patting the space beside her. "It's so bright here that you can hardly see the fireflies, whenever there are any. It makes for quite a view though, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Mari replies. Somehow, the softness of her voice is lost on Yui, who's also failed to notice that Mari's eyes haven't left her since they sat down. "Almost makes me want to stay here forever."

"Just almost?"

"We have fireflies in London too, you know. And when it rains, the humidity doesn't suffocate you."

"That's true, but are you ever going to get a sight like this in London?"

"No," whispers Mari. Even if London had been built like Tokyo-3, its streets are still too multiple and labyrinthine for it to compare. Packed alleyways and crammed sidewalks are what come to mind when Mari dreams of home despite her time in England, and she knows that won't change so long as Yui is still in Japan.

"You know, it was supposed to rain tonight," Yui says. Mari looks up at her, mouth open slightly, rattled off her train of thought. "Gendo didn't want me to stay out for too long. He said I'd get sick."

"What'd you tell him?"

"That he was being an old fuddy-duddy and that I would happily get sick if it meant catching up with you again."

"Certainly sounds like something you'd say." Mari giggles, not quite a full laugh, but it's enough to bring out that rare smile of Yui's that she'd only seen a few times before: the first when Yui told her and Kyoko about Gendo, and the second when Yui had come, alone, to say goodbye to Mari at the airport. "If it had been raining, would you still have taken me up here?"

"Well, maybe not. There wouldn't be any fireflies to look at if it was raining, but I'm sure we'd have found something else to do." At last Yui turns her head, tilting it towards Mari. "Enough about me already. How are you doing? You should be graduating soon this year, right?"

"Next year, actually. Our classes were disrupted by-"

"Right, that makes sense. I'm sorry, I should have thought about that."

"No, it's fine. Really."

Mari offers Yui what she hopes is a disarming smile, accompanying it with the slightest lift of her shoulders: a gesture so unmistakable _Mari_ in its casualness that it's like Mari hasn't changed at all, either.

"Still a molecular biology major?" asks Yui.

"Yeah, threw in a few chemistry courses too. Just to cover all the basics."

"Sounds like they let you get away with a bit more in London." Now it's Yui's turn to laugh, a sound so clear and crystalline that under it the light from the city could be sunlight, or fireflies, or whatever Yui would want it to be; whatever would prolong these wonderful seconds of her happiness.

"You should come visit. It'd be just the two of us,like before."

In an instant, the clearing goes quiet. Again, Yui's smile has faded. This time Mari confirms it's gone, and this time Yui makes no attempt to replace it. There's no reply from her either, just a silence that stretches on, that Mari realizes Yui must not know how to break. Yui is used to people who adore, but don't love her; there would be one exception to that, and that's what Mari's forgotten, or tried to- that it wasn't her.

"I'm sorry," Mari says after a while. At the edge of her periphery, Yui's hands finally stop playing with the hem of her lab coat. "I wasn't thinking."

"It's alright."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Of course I am, Mari." Yui smiles- no, she beams, and it's radiant. Mari feels her chest clenching, her heart speeding up painfully, and it's because of that- it must be- that her next question slips free.

"You're happy here, right?"

In typical fashion, Yui doesn't miss a beat. "Of course I am, why wouldn't I- oh, haven't I told you yet?"

"Told me?"

"Gendo and I have a child on the way."

"You…" The world seems to have shrunk into a sphere just large enough for Mari to take her next breath from. A moment passes before she remembers what she was about to say, and another before she can give voice to it. "You do?"

"Yes. We just found out a week ago. Now I have to think about names as well as metaphysical biology. Isn't that strange?"

"Yeah." _Breathe in. Breathe out._ "It is." _Don't look at Yui. Don't look down. Don't blink._

"He'll be a late summer baby, I think. Or early fall."

 _Don't cry_.

"Yui, it's always summer now."

"Oh, you know what I mean."

 _Don't be such a child, Mari._

"Mari, look!" Yui sits up, pointing at something down the hill. It takes Mari a few seconds to realize what she's noticed: the faint little light sitting atop a blade of grass, pulsating calmly, unperturbed by this eternal summer or the destruction that had come before it. "There's another one!"

"Yeah, I see them." Mari straightens up, placing a hand on the ground for balance. She can't help but look down when she does, and there's Yui's hand: just lying there, an inch at most from Mari's own. "Does Kyoko know?"

"About the child? No, I haven't gotten a chance to call her yet. You won't tell her, right? I wanted to surprise her."

"Of course I won't."

Mari lifts her eyes to Yui's face, scrutinizing, memorizing. As long as someone could smile like that, even if it wasn't Yui herself, there'd still be a chance at happiness in the world. Mari hoists her imitation of it onto her lips, and it fits heavily there, like a physical weight. "Yui?" she says. "I'm happy for you."

"I'm glad, Mari."

Her smile is met, reciprocated. Unseen by Yui, Mari draws her fingers back, leaving behind a series of ridges scraped into the dirt. The moment passes, and Yui continues on, pointing out firefly after firefly until the clearing is surrounded by them, an innumerable host, flickering on and off like the lights of the city below.

* * *

Tokyo-3, 2016

No one ever said if the catastrophe called Second Impact actually did tilt the planet's axis, as some thought it might have, but since then the days have always seemed a little shorter, and the sunsets as fleeting as the memories of Yui that Mari still holds.

Today's sunset is in just as much of a hurry, chasing Mari up a familiar hillside with long, winding shadows. The path that Yui and Mari had once walked together is long overgrown, leaving Mari to find her way through it. She walks carefully on earth that's more tangled, knotted roots than soil, advancing slowly towards a foot-tall stump that marks the top of the hill.

Tokyo-3 has started to come to life below, speckling the fading sunlight with artificial reds and yellows. There are enough of them clustered together for Mari to make out the center of the city and the major hubs around it, but they dwindle in number near the edges: a reminder of how many there used to be, how many were extinguished.

The constant Angel attacks have left Tokyo-3 a city half full, those who chose to stay all squeezing closer together, as if that might protect them where buildings and military strength cannot. And beyond those dense clusters of lights, there's Mari, sitting somewhere NERV would never find her: on a hillside, surrounded by the glow of fireflies.

The part of the clearing where Yui had once sat is overrun by grass and weeds, but the other half is somehow untouched. That's where Mari settles down, knees folded up and pulled against her chest, just like Yui had once sat. The grass, now so tall that it waves just below her eyeline, nearly blocks out her view of the city. That's fine, Mari thinks. She hadn't come here to look at Tokyo-3, anyway.

Still, it's a reminder. She'd been taller before, or the grass had been shorter; probably both. Mari reaches forward slowly, stretching her hand out towards the grass, fingers fully extended. She comes short of where she recalls Yui's hand had been, and this time Mari isn't caught off guard when her mouth twists into what's supposed to be a smile. These days, she's fallen short of a lot of things. Her intended landing zone in Tokyo-3, for one- and she'd just happened to crash face-first into Yui's son.

A throb of pain calls to Mari. She looks down at the pebble that's jammed itself under her fingernail, at the gashes in the earth she'd carved out when she clenched her hand into a fist. When had she done that, again?

He had Yui's eyes, and a bit of her hair, too. If only he'd been a girl, then he might have gotten her voice as well. Or, maybe it's better that Mari hadn't heard that voice again. If she did, she might've cried, and that would've blown the 'undercover' part of her mission wide open.

Yui's voice.

Even the best of minds could only hold on to the fine details for so long. Forgetting what Yui sounded like hadn't been some monumental struggle to hold on- one day, Mari tried to remember and found that she couldn't, and that was all. That was a morning spent desperately listening to old voicemails in hope that one Yui left was still there, a day called in sick, a fruitless attempt at calling Kyoko before remembering she was gone, too- and that was all.

So, Mari imagines, forgetting a person would be much the same. First their voice, then their walk or their smile, then their face-

But if Yui were alive, Mari would hope she'd remember her name, at least. Mari Makinami, the girl from college who liked me, or something like that. And maybe if that friendship had left enough of an impression, Yui might recognize her…

The thought trails off into the darkness. The night and its stillness has crept up on Mari without her noticing. Up here in the hills, where the noise of the city can't reach, the only sounds are the humming of cicadas and Mari's occasional movements.

She could whisper Yui's name, and the world would reverberate with it.

Mari doesn't. The air in her throat is frozen, ice-cold, by the thought that's taken hold of her. Even if Yui was alive, even if she saw Mari and recognized her, she would still be looking at a girl inexplicably fourteen years younger than she should be.

The picture in her mind is vivid and clear. Mari sees Yui's smile vanish, watches her old friend turn away. Her arm darts out, she's reaching for Yui-

Her fingers brush through the grass, and an indignant cloud of fireflies takes to the air.

It'd never occurred to her until now that Yui might object to this. Fourteen years of clarity meet one moment of doubt and are overwhelmed; this feeling of defeat, overwhelming and crushing, threatens to suffocate Mari where she sits. If she'd let her feelings for Yui dictate her actions for so long, then she'd be just like Ikari.

Down in the city, a single light breaks away from the pack, traveling resolutely towards the hills. That's the train Mari will need to take back into the city, not now, but soon. It's a half hour's walk to the station, and the last train arrives in 45 minutes. There's still time to wait for-

Yui.

Yui isn't coming. She can't. The clearing is half covered, the path is gone, and Yui is…

Yui's not coming.

But she might. Mari's eyes fall upon the nearest firefly, its light flashing methodically. She's counting those flashes, up to sixty, then starting over. There are fifteen minutes to spare. Twenty, maybe. Going downhill is always faster, after all. And if anywhere, this hillside would be the place it could happen; it's where they were together last. It's the closest they ever were.

Another minute. Sixty flashes. Another minute. Any moment, now. Another minute.

Another…

* * *

Bethany Base, 2014

Mari, her knees still trembling, presses her hand to the wall, willing herself forward. Another step. She takes it, and then there's only thirty more left between her and her dorm room.

What should've been a five minute trip has turned into something eight times as long: there was the walk to the elevator, which was more of a crawl, and now there's the fifteen meter corridor from the elevator to the dorm rooms. Yui might have helped develop this transfer process, but Mari doubts anyone ever tested it. That'd be her job, then: figuring out how to walk with legs that are shorter and scrawnier than she's used to. She's nearly rolled her ankle twice, but she'll get the hang of it eventually. She has to- for Yui.

Mari staggers into the side of her doorway as she reaches it, grasping at it with both hands. The shapeless, unfamiliar darkness of a room rearranged peers back at her. All the things she'd requisitioned and bought and bargained for, gone. What's left are a desk, a chair, and a bed, all standard issue.

There's no way this is the wrong room. Mari teeters in with tiny steps, not even bothering with the lights. The illumination from the hallway is bright enough. As Mari moves out of it, a thin beam of silver plays across the room, touching the lower edge of the paper left in the bed.

 _Mari_ , it reads, _your new room is two floors down in D Sector, our newly designated pilot candidate barracks. You'll be the only one there. Your belongings have already been moved, except for your clothes. We left those in the closet. You may keep what you want, though I suspect you'll be too small for them now. Be sure to dump the rest in the incinerator when you're done, along with this paper. The official briefing on the Unit-05 program is tomorrow in the hangar at 1000 hours._

And that's it. There's nothing at the bottom, no signature or NERV stamp. This paper is as unofficial as Mari herself, and the only reason Mari would listen to it is because she'd never be forgiven if she turned back now.

Her clothes are in the closet, as the note said they'd be. It catches Mari a little off guard that they are. These feel like someone else's belongings now; they might have been, if it weren't for the one thing in the back that _is_ her size, now. She hadn't worn that lab coat since she was in Kyoto. Mari had bought a new one in London when she arrived, but never made an excuse for herself as to why, just like she can't find a reason to keep her old one now. She just wants to.

Mari tosses the lab coat on the bed and starts clearing out the rest of her clothes, pulling them unceremoniously from their hangars. She tosses them into a cardboard box that was left in the closet for her, and dumps the paper from her bed on top of them. Then, tucking the lab coat under her arm, Mari grasps the box, carrying it laboriously to the door. At least there's one grace to this body-swap thing, and it's that the process of lifting things has remained the same as before.

She sets off down the hall again, her shoulder pressed up against the wall for support. No one's come this way for a while, and though it could be a coincidence, Mari's been working in NERV long enough to know it isn't. She remains alone for the rest of the trip down to the garbage chute, and the journey back to the elevator shaft.

By the time the elevator has come, spiriting Mari away to the surface level of the base, she's walking normally again. It never really left her, that thing Mari used to do to keep pace with Yui: two normal strides, and a short one, all at a rapid pace. Her normal walk was nothing like that, but now that nothing's normal, it seems fitting.

A strong wind is blowing in from the north, whipping the collar of Mari's uniform shirt around. Here in one of the few cold places left in the world, there are no buildings to block out the sky with their lights. Mari finds herself a seat beside the small, rectangular elevator entrance, resting the back of her head against it. In a few months, the construction on Bethany Base will be complete, and even here the heavens will be obscured by a set of high-rising pillars. For now, she enjoys the shapeless sprawl of sheet ice and open water, stretching endlessly until red sea merges with red sky.

It'd been around noon when she was called, and the last vestiges of night are in full retreat, pulling back before a steadily encroaching carpet of light. The stars haven't quite gone, and the brightest of them sparkle in the twilight, echoes of a heavenly sea just as cold and so much more vast than one surrounding Mari.

Yui, who spent the last years of her life in the hearts of cities or in the deepest recesses of laboratories, would never have seen something like this. She would have liked this; loved it, maybe more than she ever loved anything else-

If it had been this sky over Tokyo-3 the last time they were together, maybe it wouldn't be such a vain idea to think things could have gone differently.

Free from the shadows of civilization, it's easy to think such things. It's easier, so far from home and Tokyo-3 and Yui's empty grave, to be borne along by memories and wishes, and forget the cruel reality that spawned them. Here under the cloudless sky, Mari could let herself pretend that Kyoto was never in ruins and that Fuyutsuki's class would start in an hour, but until then she'd find a bench with Yui and Kyoko and get some drinks and wait-

A large wave crests over the side of the platform, and the wind sprays Mari's face with its remains. Her eyes fly open, and the vision she'd carefully assembled is gone, though it had never really been complete. She'd forgotten the sound of her friend's voices long ago, and even the drinks they'd buy. What lingers instead is the way Yui would curl her fingers around her drink can, and how Mari had imagined that, one day, Yui might hold her hand in the same way.

It was only the little things that Mari could remember well. She'd tried on, that night on the hill, to memorize every bit of it, but the lights of the city burn stronger in her mind than Yui's smile, and even they have dimmed with the years.

Or maybe, it's because this body had never been there.

There's no going back. Mari's old body, by now no doubt burned and scattered, or sent plunging into the ocean's depths, would offer no better a memory than this one. Something hot stings Mari's eyes, and it takes her a second to remember that this is how tears feel like. Mari blinks them back, forcing her mouth not to quiver. If this is to be her new start, she won't let it be ruined by crying. She won't cry again, she swears- she'll face whatever comes at her with the same exuberant persistence that Yui was known for.

The threat of tears stifled, Mari returns to her previous watch of the stars. The sun has begun to rise: not yet visible, the first hints of its arrival stretch over the horizon, tinting the stars gold. Through the chilled and quietly dissipating remnants of Mari's tears, they appear as twinkling, glowing orbs, darting in and out of sight like fireflies.

* * *

Tokyo-3, 2016

The sun hasn't risen yet, but there's enough light in the sky to dazzle Mari's eyes. Through the dew that's collected on her glasses, she can make out the shape of the grass swaying around her, and fireflies, slowly blinking, drifting around the clearing.

As Mari sits up, the crick in her neck nearly pulls her back down, though she works past it. She doesn't remember falling asleep. The last thing she recalls from the night before is losing sight of the train, and seeing only fireflies. It must have been then, or sometime soon after, that she fell asleep.

It was, to her disappointment, an unremarkable sleep. There were no dreams of Yui, not even a dream that Mari could remember. The closeness to Yui she'd felt the night before is gone, too. Or, more likely, it was just never there, and was all imagined by Mari.

The sounds coming from Tokyo-3 are not the ones of a city awake, but soon the trains will be running again, and people will be going to work. In theory there'd be no one who could recognize Mari, but there's still Section 2 to contend with. It'd be better for Mari to get back to her apartment under the cover of the morning rush, when even all of NERV's security struggles to keep up with a sea of shifting bodies.

Mari's knees crack as she stands. The sound, or maybe her movement, stirs up a cluster of fireflies that had been resting on a nearby clump of grass. They take flight in a circle around her, lights flashing lethargically, as if wondering what this disturbance is. As Mari proceeds down the hill, each step disrupts more, and soon there's a cloud of fireflies around her: blinking, swarming, bumping into her damp clothes and landing in her hair. They form a cylinder around her, not thick enough to obscure Mari's vision, but dense enough that if Mari reached out, she would brush aside tens of fireflies.

Pausing briefly, Mari looks up. The swirl of fireflies continues on above her head, reaching into the sky like a tower, and Mari can't make out how far they reach. Their lights, distinguishable like stars amidst the multitude of bodies, look just like the night sky. Maybe this is what Yui had seen, that she'd hoped Mari might be able to experience, too: lights like this, that couldn't be found in Kyoto.

And the connection's back. It weighs in Mari's chest, like an anchor that tells her to stop here and settle down, but she has to keep going. If Mari wants to stay true to her mission, this memory of Yui's can't be allowed to keep her here.

She trudges on, careful to avoid treading on fireflies, until she reaches the bottom of the hill. Here the dirt and gravel mix with the crumpled fragments of an unkept asphalt road, and further down the street, Mari can see the worn but telltale sign marking the station she'll have to go to. The fireflies, seemingly sensing this, press in around her: their wings beat against Mari's skin, and if it's at all possible, it looks like their lights are blinking faster. Another thought occurs, that maybe the fireflies don't want her to go either.

For the sake of this assignment, for Yui and her son, Mari has to.

The soles of her shoes touch the road, and it's like air around her has shifted. The fireflies, no longer a synchronized group, begin to drift in different directions. They're all heading back towards the hills, away from the city and Mari. She turns, watching her escort break apart into a thousand individual lights, and finds her gaze drawn to the top of the mountain. The first rays of morning sunlight peer over it, a brilliant red-gold, steady against the flickering of the fireflies, only just touching the edge of the road that Mari's started down.


End file.
